What happens in the Data Center, ends up here.

Category Archives: vSphere

We have been having some issues with the upstream switches in our environment, and one of the resulting joys we encountered was the enactment of our HA Isolation policy, which was set to Shut Down. While trying to troubleshoot the switching issue we upgraded the switch stack which took about 12 minutes – and also removed connectivity to the default gateway of our 11 VM hosts. When trying to test after the upgrade was complete, we tried to ping VirtualCenter as well as a few other hosts inside, and pounded our heads trying to figure out why all routing and switching was broken after a simple IOS upgrade.

After a bit of cussing and more digging, we found that we’d actually been up, but that every single VM was down (our VirtualCenter is a virt, as is the dependent DB). No need to panic, we just need to dig around and figure out where they live, turn them on, and the rest will be easy. When you’re in a hurry to fix a problem, right clicking on the vSphere Client icon in the Windows 7 taskbar to launch a new window 11 times isn’t fun or efficient. Neither is typing in the name of each server (or IP), and neither is typing in the ridiculously cryptic root password.

That all led me to thinking about how to make it faster, and searching for VirtualCenter Command Line Options, Parameters, Switches, or whatever you might want to call them. It wasn’t exactly easy to do, considering there is also a command line function for almost every part of well, everything VMWare.

I first found John O’Riordan’s Blog on vSphere Client Command Line Options which solved the problem of creating a nice and neat shortcut for each of the individual host servers when vCenter is down. Although, I must admit that putting the root password into a .lnk file makes me want to reconsider my stance as a security professional. I’ll figure out how to solve that later – for now they’re on an encrypted disk…

Now, how do I get into vCenter itself quickly? This is where my friends over at TechTarget came to the rescue with their article on Configuring Single Sign-On (SSO) to log into VirtualCenter.

For the specific Hosts, the properties of the shortcut are as follows: